2D Art

Over the past few weeks I have been attempting to teach myself some basic pixel art skills, for use in future games I make. As of yet, I’m still not very good but I thought that I should make a blog documenting my process so far.

Starting with the blog by Glauber Kotaki called ‘Introduction to Pixel Art for Games‘, I was instructed to follow a processes to replicate a 2D figure. The figure was in an aggressive stance, and was slightly angled, which is a problem I’ve had with drawing in the past. Although the tutorial recommended Photoshop, I was using a pixel art program called Aesprite.

This is the figure

The challenge with pixel art is displaying enough detail within a small space. To achieve this its recommended that “you start with the smallest, most readable feature”. On a humanoid, that would be the eyes.

Maybe this pixel art thing isn’t so hard after all

From this point, normally the next step would be to draw the line art, but this particular tutorial recommended drawing the silhouette first, so I proceeded to try my best to replicate the example the blog had.

Mine is on the left, the example is on the right

At this point, I think I had already screwed up but I didn’t realize it at the time, until I got most of the way through the next step, which was to draw the line art (the outline for the character).

You’ll notice that the feed are pretty different

At this point the figure really started to take shape, although I did mess up the feet somehow, I also added an outline for the bottom the foot which the tutorial didn’t have.

I took a bit of creative license with the colour

Again, the right foot looks different to the above picture, but I think it actually looks better after the last set of changes and looks like the character is standing on his toes on the right foot , which I like. The last step was to add shading to the figure, which is something I had absolutely no idea how to do, so I just picked similar colours and copied the the example image exactly.

Not too bad for a first attempt

I also decided to try to draw two completely different figures following these guidelines.

My first attempt at Captain America

As you can tell, I followed the tutorial pretty closely for this one although I am now realizing that I forgot to outline the jaw. The star and the wing on the side of the helmet were definitely the hardest part, but overall I feel like I did pretty good. For my next attempt I used the same guidelines but I did not use the tutorial for reference and… well…

Some viking… thing

Let’s just agree that it’s not great. But like I said earlier, I am trying to learn the basics, so I’m not going to create the new Mona Lisa anytime soon. I think my next step is to take a step back and draw inanimate objects, followed by some basic textures, for example the inside of a room. Eventually I will get back into drawing humanoids and hopefully by that time I’ll be a lot better at drawing curves and colours/shading.